John Bierman

12:01AM GMT 13 Jan 2006

John Bierman, who has died aged 76, made his name with a brilliant on-the-ground report on Bloody Sunday in 1972; he later became a successful author of historical and biographical books on subjects from Napoleon III to Alamein.

Hired as a reporter by the BBC in the 1960s, Bierman already had some experience as a foreign correspondent when he was ordered to Bogside in Londonderry to cover what was supposed to be a Catholic civil rights demonstration.

Despite being ordered to get out, Bierman and his crew stayed. "Minutes later," he recalled, "we and other TV crews were incapacitated by CS gas, fired by the security forces during a tense confrontation with demonstrators throwing stones and insults.

Police water cannons opened up, putting the demonstrators to flight - knocking out of action all TV cameras but our own.

"Then into view, crouching low and waving a blood-soaked white handkerchief, came a dog-collared priest, Father Daly, who later became Bishop of Derry. Behind him were two men carrying a third - a youth, whose chest was covered in blood. I had little doubt he was mortally wounded."

Bierman filed a 13-minute report live to camera in the midst of the bloodshed. It later won an award at the Cannes film festival.

John Bierman was born on January 26 1929 into an East End Jewish family, the only child of Richard Bierman, an antique dealer, and his wife Beatrice. They took little interest in him, so young John was brought up by his grandparents.

At the age of 11 he was evacuated to the countryside during the Blitz, an experience which he saw as a wonderful adventure. Despite an erratic education (he attended some 15 schools), he acquired a love of reading.

Following National Service with the Royal Marines, Bierman became a print journalist, and after a spell on a provincial newspaper in Stoke on Trent, he took passage on a cattle boat to Canada, where he was to spend two years working on newspapers.

Returning to London in the mid 1950s, he married his first wife, Alice, with whom he had two children. He worked for a time for the Daily Express, but, restless in London, took up an offer to set up and edit The Nation, a newspaper owned by the Aga Khan which was based in Kenya.

In the early 1960s he moved to Trinidad to manage a chain of newpapers for the Thomson Corporation.

On returning to London he joined the BBC and soon built a reputation as a rough diamond, decked out in a sheepskin jacket or wrinkled safari suit, reporting from trouble-spots around the world: Northern Ireland, Biafra, Israel (the Yom Kippur War) and Pakistan (the Indo-Pakistan war).

In Rawalpindi he met and fell in love with Hilary Brown, a reporter from Canada, who was once described by a colleague as "a lady journalist who looks like Aphrodite and talks like Ernest Hemingway".

They later married, and Bierman successfully ran a World Service bureau in Tehran until he offended the Shah, who expelled him.

Abandoning the life of a foreign correspondent, Bierman had more time to concentrate on his book-writing ambitions. His first great success was the best-selling biography of the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved up to 100,000 Hungarian Jews in Budapest in 1945.

After a spell as foreign editor of Macleans magazine in Canada, where his wife became an established TV anchorwoman, the pair moved to Cyprus, using it as a base from which to patrol the Middle East.

Bierman wrote well-received biographies of Napoleon III and Henry Stanley, the African explorer. More recently, in collaboration with Colin Smith, another Cyprus-based veteran correspondent, he published Alamein and Fire in the Night, the story of General Wingate.

Failing health dogged Bierman's later years. After suffering kidney failure he was saved from death or life on a dialysis machine by his son, then a student at Durham university, who donated one of his kidneys to save his father in 2002.

Bierman, who died on January 4 in Paphos, Cyprus, is survived by his wife, their son and a daughter and a son from his first marriage.